There is no excuse for not having Change management.
If you are a one man band or if you have a very small team, you are most likely very busy man. Not only do you have to work on day to day user requests, you also have look after the servers, update windows clients, windows servers, spam filtering for email system, look after exchange or similar, look after virtual infrastructure, Citrix clients…. Have I missed anything? Please add it to the list.
What happens if you or a member of your team do a change, and later discover that something is broken?
How do you revert the change?
Do you know what you or member of your team did?
Do you still remember after one week, which spam filtering rule you altered?
And what you need to change to revert back so that spam wont be coming in, or worse, that relevant emails wont be stopped at the server?
Is there a way to do change management even if you only have professional version of service desk?
Yes, there is.
No, it’s not MS Excel.
And there is no excuse to not use it.
Even if you are a one man band.
Solution is called ServiceDesk Plus Professional.
And once you are used to it, I am sure you will love Enterprise version even more when your company grows to the level you will upgrade.
Lets create subcategory Change management, just for this example.
We need to create new template, go to Admin, Incident templates, Click on Add new template.
I will name it Change management.
We need to add custom fields:
Significance: Minor, Significant, Moderate
Planned start,
Planned finish,
Owner,
Status: Successful, Failed
Type: Windows, AV, SPAM, ERP, DB, Intranet…
Go to Requests, fill all the fields, attach all the info that is required, screenshots…save it.
We need to create a report that would show us all the changes.
Go to reports, click on New custom report
Name it Change management
Add following fields:
Request ID, Subject, Significance, Planned start, planned finish, Owner, Status, Type
Go to filter options, Select Subcategory Change management, we do that so that we only see items that are relevant.
Run report – voila, we see all required info.
Please think about your environment and requirements, so that you will have data that is relevant for you.
